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Mugabe's Party Wins Majority in Zimbabwe

HARARE, Zimbabwe, April 1 - President Robert G. Mugabe's party routed its opponents in parliamentary elections, nearly complete returns showed Friday, dashing forecasts of an opposition surge and solidifying the president's 25-year grip on Zimbabwe politics.

The lopsided outcome cast fresh doubts on the strength and strategy of the opposition, as well as the fairness of the vote. Mr. Mugabe's opponents, who lost elections in 2000 and 2002 that were widely condemned as rigged, again charged fraud in Thursday's election.

Some democracy advocates urged the opposition to mount mass protests. They said the returns proved that a fair election was impossible in this increasingly isolated country where democratic freedoms are a matter of Mr. Mugabe's whim.

At a news conference, Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, charged that Mr. Mugabe's party had stolen the election through intimidation and vote-rigging, and he left open the prospect that he would urge his supporters to take to the streets. "Zimbabweans must defend their right to vote and they must defend their vote," he said.

But supporters of Mr. Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, said the results of Zimbabwe's first peaceful election in five years showed that the 81-year-old president ruled not by force or threats, but with overwhelming popular support.

Reports of irregularities were scattered but persistent. Domestic election observers said the fairness of the vote would be impossible to assess until reports were filed this weekend from more than 6,000 poll monitors. The Bush administration, however, issued a statement that all but condemned the vote. "Although the election campaign and election day itself were generally peaceful, the election was not free and fair," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a written statement. "The electoral playing field was heavily tilted in the government's favor."

With almost 90 percent of the districts reporting, election analysts said that ZANU-PF had captured 70 seats in the 150-seat Parliament. Because Mr. Mugabe appoints 30 other members, that gave the party a two-thirds majority in the legislature, Mr. Mugabe's main goal.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change, known as the M.D.C., had won 35 seats, far short of the 51 it held entering Thursday's vote. One seat was won by an independent candidate. With just 14 races undecided, the opposition could gather only a few more seats, at best, analysts said.

That would make the ruling ZANU-PF all but unassailable in the national legislature, and render the opposition essentially toothless.

The opposition and some democracy advocates contended even before the election that the ruling party had rigged the vote. While they monitored the actual voting, election observers could not verify either the number of ballots printed or the accuracy of voter rolls, which are widely reported to be padded with vast numbers of dead or nonresident citizens.

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About one in 10 voters was turned away from polling stations, although government officials insisted that those voters had been improperly registered. Opposition officials complained that large numbers of their election monitors had been wrongly evicted from polling places as votes were being tallied.

The government also redrew the boundaries in some districts, weakening opposition strongholds.

But the crucial factor in Mr. Mugabe's victory, some democracy advocates said, was five years of strong-arm rule that they said had conditioned voters to fear government retaliation if they supported the opposition.

A relaxation of that intimidation created the appearance of a free election in recent weeks, as foreign journalists and observers entered the country, but did not reverse the impact of years of violence and threats, they said.

"All the things you are seeing now only happened in the last four weeks," Reginald Matchaba-Hove, head of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a pro-democracy coalition, said in an interview on Friday. Until then, he said, "the political space was closed."

Lovemore Madhuku, one of Zimbabwe's best-known democracy advocates, echoed opposition calls for protests. "People must show their disaffection with Mugabe through other means," Mr. Madhuku said. "Let us make people appreciate that unless we change the rules, there is no way that we can win an election."

Friday's tallies poured cold water on the predictions of several top opposition officials earlier this week of big electoral gains. Those predictions were based in part on huge turnouts of supporters at rallies for M.D.C. candidates, the tepid response to Mr. Mugabe's appearance at many ZANU-PF rallies, and a strong turnout of voters in the first hours of Thursday's vote.

Before the election, Mr. Mugabe presided over a political party riven by blood feuds and beset by a resurgent opposition. After it, the opposition is in disarray, and the issue of who will succeed him seems his to decide. Some analysts suggest that Mr. Mugabe expressly wanted a two-thirds parliamentary majority so he could rewrite the Constitution to allow him to select a successor before the 2008 presidential elections.

Should sympathetic international observers declare the vote fair, Mr. Mugabe may even puncture Zimbabwe's diplomatic isolation by Western nations. That might increase foreign assistance, making his gamble that he could persuade outsiders that the election was honest look shrewd.

But that is the short term. In the long run, some say, the renewal of Mr. Mugabe's 25-year autocracy may be its undoing. Zimbabwe's problems -- a worthless currency, a collapsed economy, an exodus of skilled citizens, a hungry and sick population whose life expectancy has literally been halved -- are unchanged by the election.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 2, 2005, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: Mugabe's Party Wins Majority In Zimbabwe. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe